Zapier and The Excel API

17 Aug 2016

I have been finding quite a few nuggets of wisdom out of the recent release of the Microsoft Excel API. This is what I enjoy doing as the API Evangelist, evaluate and gather any positive or negative activities performed by the leading API players, craft blog posts in hopes that other API providers will read, enabling them be more successful in their own API operations.

As part of my monitoring, I am also looking for significant trends that may reflect other wider industry opportunities, beyond any individual API. I am always telling API providers to think about integrating iPaaS solutions like Zapier into their operations as early as possible, and I think Microsoft's acknowledgment in their release emphasizes the importance of iPaaS.

Here is the language, directly out of Microsoft's release post:

Zapier lets users easily automate tedious tasks. Zapier recently announced a new Excel integration, powered by Excel REST API, with near-infinite use cases, like simplifying a data collection process. Users can now build zaps where data is automatically added into Excel from other services, like emails and surveys, making Excel the data repository for all your connected services.

I am guessing that Microsoft Excel API team did their homework, and saw the number of Google Sheet integrations available on Zapier. When it comes to integration platform as a service, being able to take data, content, and other resources and put it into a spreadsheet, has to be in the top 10 of use case scenarios. Moving the bits and bytes we are creating on the web daily, and making available via the familiar spreadsheet UI, is increasingly how business gets done on the ground at the average organization.

I guess there are two nuggets here for my API provider audience: 1) iPaaS, and specifically Zapier integration is growing important 2) Making sure your API is available as Zapier integration with Excel and Google spreadsheets might be something else you will want to consider too!